SpringSource pushes latest Toolsuites to Github in continuing open drive

SpringSource decided to head down a different route with their Eclipse tooling suite, by making components up for grabs on Github

SpringSource’s latest major release of Eclipse-based tooling
suites have arrived, not only bringing a raft of new features but a
change of direction.

Martin Lippert, the engineer behind the Spring flavour of
Eclipse tools,
revealed a number of fundamental changes aiming to revitalise
Spring Tool Suite just after the release of Eclipse Juno. The
biggest change arguably is a split of the core offering into two,
keeping the core Spring Tool Suite but introducing a new
option.

Groovy/Grails Tool
Suite is a full distribution of our Eclipse-based
tooling tailored for Groovy development. As well as having
Groovy-Eclipse pre-installed, Groovy developers can use specialised
Grails tooling on top of the latest Eclipse Juno 4.2 release. This
eliminates the tedious extensions that had to occur before you
could start. With Groovy and Grails in from the start, it means
developers can get up and running in no time.

The Spring Tool
Suite remains a full Eclipse-based tooling distribution
that links up to existing Spring projects. Here, we see enhanced
support for the Spring Core framework and its related projects such
as Spring Batch and Spring Data, but also updates to include rapid
application development tool Spring Roo.

Alongside this logical repackaging of STS comes an equally
logical move. Keen to boast of their open source heritage, the
decision to move to all parts of the two tool suites to Github
(under an Eclipse Public License) could see more Spring
developers pick it up.

Projects have also been componentized into different parts at
Github to create better modularisation across the board. These
include the Spring IDE, Grails IDE, as well as others.

This makes things for simpler by reducing the number of
dependencies between the collection of projects. It also allows the
user to consume what they want from a project, rather than needing
a certain number of things to continue.

With this Github olive branch being extended, developers can now
take advantage of pull requests for these projects. This should
instigate further innovation through using Git instead of JIRA. Why
not contribute today? Check out all the Github projects here.